About

Reading Matters is edited by me, Kim Forrester (aka kimbofo), a self-confessed book addict.

I created this site in 2004 (before most people even knew what a “blog” was) to share my love of books with a wider audience, but there are reviews on Reading Matters dating from 2001, which were originally published on a personal website (yes, this was before blogs existed, making me officially very old!)

I used Typepad for 10 years before I moved all my reviews — more than 800 at the time — to WordPress in August 2014. I cleaned up all the content, got rid of “chatty” posts and have distilled the site into purely book reviews and book lists.

(You can read a bit about the history of my blog via the post titled Reading Matters turns 13 or in this interview I did with Books + Publishing magazine in May 2017.)

The site’s main focus is modern and contemporary fiction, though I’m not averse to reading the odd classic or two. Indeed, I like to hunt out older books and those that may have slipped under the radar instead of reading the same things everyone else is reading.

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking”

Haruki Murakami

My special interest is Irish literary fiction and Australian literary fiction, but I also have a penchant for books in translation, true crime, crime fiction, memoir and narrative non-fiction.

My two favourite authors are the late John McGahern and Jennifer Johnston, both of whom are Irish.

My favourite Australian writer is Richard Flanagan, and I have written a guide about his novels which is on the Penguin website.

I also admire (in no particular order) Sebastian Barry, Jean Rhys, MJ Hyland, Alex Miller, Per Petterson, Jane Gardam, Kate Grenville, Kent Haruf, Deidre Madden, Magnus Mills, Elliot Perlman, Elizabeth Harrower, Helen Garner, Colm Tóibín, William Trevor and Damon Galgut.

You can find out more on my favourite author’s page.

To see what kinds of novels I like, please see my post 40 books or check out this list of 16 books for 16 years of blogging to see what sort of books have left a deep impression on me.

I have dual nationality with Australia, where I was born and lived until my late 20s, and the UK, where I lived and worked in London for 20 years. In June 2019, I escaped the horrors of Brexitland to try living in the beautiful port town of Fremantle on the Western Australian coast, 30 minutes south of Perth, a place I had only previously visited on holiday.

I am a trained journalist and spent around 15 years working on specialist consumer magazines in the UK before moving into branding, marketing and corporate communications. I am currently the publications manager at one of Australasia’s largest philanthropies.

You can contact me by email: readingmatters@gmail.com

I’m also all on the following social media sites: 

• Facebook
• GoodReads
• Instagram

Please note, as outlined in my review policy, I do not participate in blog tours, host giveaways, review self-published work or accept books directly from authors.